Direct position estimation from wavefront curvature with single antenna array

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the possibility to perform direct positioning by retrieving information from the wavefront curvature. Despite such an approach has been considered in the past at microwave and acoustic frequencies using extremely large antennas, it is of interest to investigate its potential exploitation at mm-wave with practical size antennas in the context of next 5G systems. Thus, here we first consider a dedicated model to gather the source position information from the wavefront curvature for different array architectures, i.e., traditional and lens-based arrays, and successively we derive the maximum likelihood estimator to investigate the attainable performance. Results, obtained for different number of antennas, i.e., for different array apertures, confirm the possibility to achieve interesting positioning performance using a single antenna array with limited dimensions.

A survey on 5G massive MIMO localization

“…Recently, Direct Source Localization (DiS-ouL) technique is proposed in [108], and the measurements acquired at each base station are jointly processed [108]. The possibility of directly inferring the transmitter position for mmWave has been investigated in [109]. It shows the advantage of using lens-embedded antenna array to reduce the antenna size or improve the localization performance.…”

Radio Positioning With EM Processing of the Spherical Wavefront

“…Other interesting opportunities account for the execution of mathematical operations with layers of metamaterials [63], the realization of electronically reconfigurable transmitarray [64], or reconfigurable reflectarray technology [65]. In this context, starting from our analysis in [49], [66], [67], here we investigate the radio positioning capabilities of a mm-wave source by introducing a generic architecture composed of an EM processing section, which can directly operate on the spherical wavefront, and of an array architecture that collects the impinging signal, as shown in Fig. 1.…”

Communication and Localization with Extremely Large Lens Antenna Array

“…The spherical wave-front is also proven to provide an underlying generic parametric model for estimating the position of UE and scatterers [22], [23]. Several works start to investigate the localization potential with large advanced antenna arrays to realize the vision of multi-purpose services for 6G (joint communication, control, localization, and sensing) [24]- [29] in addition to communication capabilities. Concentrated and distributed large antenna arrays are compared in [24] in terms of localization performance.…”